All present and accounted for, Sir

Well, at least I am alive — according to my doctor –who run test after test to verify that.

It has been awhile — December in fact. I’m not quite as bad as Brother Mojo who broke silence after many months. And, he even played some tournaments in the interim. Didn’t tells us about it either and he chopped the final table. I guess he didn’t he didn’t want to bore us. Fortunately, I don’t have such lofty standards.

OK, lets talke about the government. I still have no idea about what going on in the White House so I’ll leave that for another post.

They did away with privacy. ISP’s can now sell all your data. I use and recommend a VPN. It is a service that you load at startup. It goes to it own server and is encrypted. That server anonomizor. You have an internet address that goes something like: 244.255,128.123. Your ISP can change that but it records the change. The anonomizor does away with that.

Are you home free, no. Every site puts a cookie in your computer. Those are still there. You need something like Gostery or similar. One will be mention later. You control who puts cookies that persist in you computer. Some sites you visit daily you’ll want that. Others you really don’t want following around. Such apps can ax that.

OK, so we have even less privacy than in the past. Most ISP say they won’t track; but it is lucrative. You consider Comcast to be your BFF? OK, me neither.

Take a look at what got me started. This is from duckduckgo.com. They probably could have come up with a better name. What it is is a combination of Google, Bing etc. But, they are also anonimizors. They don’t track what you search for and don’t know what you’re up to.

My VPN is privateinternetaccess.com and it cost me $34/yr. Yes, that means I can download the latest blockbuster with impunity. Truth is I’m not a big movie watcher. I use it for all the rest of the privacy reasons.

Here’s the duckduckgo article that cost this — for me — long post:

Last email we discussed the ads that track you across the internet. But, did you know this tracking can actually cost you money?!

Retailers are increasingly charging “personalized” or “dynamic” prices based on your online footprint. They manipulate prices, trying to charge you the max they think you’re willing to pay. You could be sitting right next to someone, looking at the same online product, and be charged more just because of a website you visited.

You’re probably familiar with how common this practice is in the airline industry. That’s all thanks to Google’s ITA QPX Software; which provides solutions to airlines to price “by market segment, point-of-sale, channel and even user.”

That profit comes right out of your pocket because they decided you were willing to pay more for your flight based on tracking.

The worst part is, this sneaky pricing tactic has long been used in other industries. The Wall Street Journal ran a study on the matter as far back as 2012:

And the dynamic pricing trend only continues to grow more and more aggressive! If you haven’t installed Privacy Badger yet (to help block trackers), then now might be a good time.

If you haven’t installed Privacy Badger yet, then now might be a good time.

Proudly Private,

Dax the Duck,Mascot – DuckDuckGo

Addendum:

I do want to do a Trump post. That is a confusing topic but I’ll try to get something rational about an irrational goverment.